Windows Phone 7 users might be feeling a bit dejected and left out today, since Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 8 (Apollo), with all its awesome new features, will not be coming to existing Mango phones. However, once you get past the initial shock and disappointment, you are sure to realize that things aren’t all that bleak for legacy device owners. There is the 7.8 update in the offing, promising to bring a lot of hardware-independent Apollo features to legacy devices, and then there is Amazon’s Audible app that has now finally arrived in the Marketplace. People have been waiting for the app for quite a while now, and it has arrived at a good time, right after Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8’s Audible integration a few hours ago. The app itself is everything you would expect from an Amazon app, and brings its entire audiobook repository to Mango phones.

If you are already an Amazon user, you can sign in to the WP7 version of Audible using your older account credentials. The app also offers the option to create a new account, but if you want to get a taste of things even before doing that, the developers of Audible have added a few example excerpts in this free app’s user library. You can find these snippets of popular audiobooks in the my library section of the app. If you have already got a few audiobooks in your Amazon account, they will be automatically synced with the Mango app. Audible shows its true potential when you go to its Shop section. The Audible audiobook store is categorized based on new releases and best sellers. The Shop area also has a link to the Amazon mobile store, where users can get even more variety in audiobooks.

Audible for WP7 supports gestures as well, and that makes navigating between different snippets of a book a real treat. You can tap your screen to pause a reading session, swipe to the right to skip forward 30 seconds, and swipe left for rewind. If you have never heard an Audible audiobook before, you will not be disappointed by their quality. The narration is very enticing (and even accompanied by sound effects at some places), and not just a robotic voice reading everything out monotonously. Another great thing about the app’s audiobooks is that they keep running even under lockscreen or when the app is in the background.

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The news section of Audible keeps you in the loop regarding latest releases in the Amazon shop, and other app-related happenings. To keep users interested in their book collection, and to give the whole thing a competitive touch, Audible has a badge collection of its own in which users have to unlock new achievements by using the app more. In order to track your book stats and app usage, there is the your titles section in the app that will show a graphical representation of the number of hours you have spent using the app and the amount of books you have purchased.

Audible for WP7 really makes us wonder about the kind of integration WP8 will offer with this service. Of course, the app itself is free (although most of the books are not), and you can check it out at the following link.